Resources: Review - The relentless pace of change in youth policy

Even so, times move on fast, and references to, for example, the Children and Young People's Unit are now already out of date: it was scrapped in the reconfiguration of children and family services within the Department for Education and Skills in the autumn of 2003.

This is, indeed, a major problem in writing, or editing, any substantive text on youth policy. The policy context is prone to increasingly rapid change, making such texts dated almost as soon as they are published. The editors maintain that those chapters that have not been revised have "stood the test of time" but, in the examples they cite, I am not so sure. Some make virtually no mention of any literature beyond the mid-1990s: in other words, after the election of the Labour government, which, for good or for bad, has significantly altered the landscape of youth policy, perspectives on young people and the challenges they face.